


As time slipped away

by Jacqueline_64



Category: Starsky & Hutch
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: s01e22 A Coffin for Starsky, Gen, Not Beta Read, Short Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-04 02:08:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21189800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jacqueline_64/pseuds/Jacqueline_64
Summary: Hutch's thoughts, feelings and experiences throughout the last 6 hours of the 24-hour race against the clock to save Starsky's life.





	As time slipped away

The most used disclaimer:  
The TV show "Starsky and Hutch", and the characters from it  
are the property of the persons who hold the copyrights  
and other legal rights to them.  
This story is a work of fiction, written for pleasure only  
and not for profit. It is not intended, in any way,  
to infringe on these preexisting copyrights.

# AS TIME SLIPPED AWAY

Jacqueline©2019-10-27

Short story inspired by A Coffin for Starsky.

_I’ll never forget Captain Dobey’s words._

** _“We just found your third possible – he’s been dead four days – heart attack….”_ **

_My feet felt like they were cemented to the floor. It was almost 10 PM, the time Starsky had suggested to Dr. Franklin that he'd return to the hospital, in case we wouldn’t have succeeded in finding the bastard who’d injected him with the lethal concoction. _

_As I stood nailed to the floor of Captain Dobey’s office, Starsky wobbled away from my supportive grip and shuffled weakly into the squad room. I couldn't follow him until after finding the same, dark, disbelief in Dobey's eyes that I felt in my heart. Starsky had just 6 hours to live and we were back to square one._

_I knew I had to take my partner to the hospital, but I wanted to give him a moment to digest this latest blow. All I could do is sit with him and wait. My brain was fried, after 18 anxious, waking, hours, but I still tried to think of anything that could save my partner’s life. _

_Then this lady came in, asking if she could look at the pictures of the three possibles that the computer had coughed up this morning. What was the point? I had no time for this. Computers apparently **can** make mistakes. Still, she was so damned persistent that I let her take another look at the three mug shots, just so that she would stop whining in that annoying voice of hers._

_I offered Starsky some water which he refused and then he told me that if we were in a cowboy movie right now, he’d give me his boots. God, that really hit me, but not half as much as when he opened his hand for me to put mine in and simply said that I was his pal. Never before did so few words have so much meaning! I was on the verge of breaking down… too many stressed out hours without sleep, filled with too much fear and now the knowledge that within hours I would lose my best friend, my partner …. It was just too much._

_But then that lady with the annoying voice positively identified Vic Bellamy as the guy we’d been looking for! Of all the absurdness of this roller coaster ride we were on, he was the first suspect we’d visited and we had both been too out of it to notice that his leg cast was sloppy and home made. I could have kissed that annoying, wonderful, lady, but Starsky had pushed himself up from his chair and had stumbled toward the door, apparently determined to get Bellamy himself._

_In hindsight I should have just taken him to the hospital. He couldn’t really walk anymore, his rubbery legs were all over the place as he moved forward and I had to hold him upright, but we were on a mission and so I loaded him into the Torino and raced to Bellamy’s apartment building. I already regretted it 2 minutes into our drive over. Starsky started slumping sideways against the passenger door, yet when I had to make a sharp left turn, he had no control over his body, so he almost fell into my lap. _

_When we arrived at the building, I told him to stay in the car, but true to his character he opened the passenger door and practically fell out of the Torino. As I picked him up from the sidewalk, I again urged him to let me take care of things, but again he persuaded me to let him come with me, again against my better judgement. _

_Of course getting Starsky, whose control over his body was rapidly diminishing, up the many stairs that led to Bellamy’s apartment cost us valuable time. I practically had to carry him up the last two flights, and by the time we got to the apartment, Bellamy had already fled to the roof._

_As soon as I told Starsky he should stay where he was, holding himself upright by clinging to the doorpost of the Bellamy apartment, I knew my stubborn partner would probably not listen. And, sadly, I was right. On the roof during our shootout, I tried to figure out how to capture Bellamy alive. At the same time, Bellamy came to the realization that he had the upper hand. After all, he was the party who knew what was in the hypo which he had used some 20 hours earlier to inject poison into my partner. _

_And then it happened. Starsky had somehow managed to make it up to the roof as well. A rapid fire and down Bellamy went. Dead as dead is. The sheer horror of holding his dead body; the utter shock I felt as I looked over to where Starsky was leaning against the wall, gasping for air in his final, living, hours…. Feelings I never want to experience again in my lifetime._

_Starsky could only manage an answer to one of my questions to him, before dropping down to the ground and losing consciousness. I left him there and ran to the first apartment I saw on the top floor, banged on its door while yelling it was the police, showed my badge to the bewildered occupant and phoned in for an ambulance. I forgot to call for a coroner’s wagon, for I had to return to my dying partner. By the time I got back to the roof, Starsky’s breathing was very irregular and labored and he was sweating so profusely it almost looked like he was melting. _

_Although the ambulance arrived relatively soon after I’d made the call, every second was one too many in Starsky’s death scenario. After I’d told the paramedics to which hospital they should take Starsky, they radioed ahead to notify Dr. Franklin and his staff._

_As soon as Starsky was wheeled into the emergency room the doors closed, even for me, and the medical team started working on him. Not that there was a lot they could do. This wasn’t a “normal” resucitation like one for a person who’s been in an accident or had a heart attack. I watched through the porthole window in the door long enough to see Franklin empty several syringes of liquids into the IV drip in Starsky’s arm, probably with chemicals that could at least slow down the devastating effects of the poison. _

_I called Captain Dobey from the pay phone, to ask him to come to the hospital. I gave him a brief update after he’d arrived. Then a nurse came out to take me into the emergency room. I could see Starsky’s eyes were open again. It was heartbreaking to see his eyes wander from the nurses, to Franklin and to all the machinery in the room. I wondered how much of what was going on really registered with him. _

_Then, after having administered yet another shot into the IV drip, Franklin told me in so many words that he and his staff had done all they could and Starsky only had about 2 hours left._

_I know I acted as if I realized... as if I was aware that this was our last goodbye. But I wasn’t. Suddenly the room seemed eerily quiet. I didn’t hear the beeps of the heart monitor anymore, nor the whizzing of the oxygen tank. I felt like I was sucked into a vacuum where no sound existed. I bent over my partner, close to his face and told him I had to leave him. I was unsure if he could hear me and if he did, if he could comprehend what I was saying. His face was like a mask, almost without expression. The poison was wreaking havoc to his central nervous system, rendering all his muscle functions practically useless. _

_I could see in his eyes he wanted to say something to me, but all he could manage was a softly whispered “okay”. I wanted to tell him so many things, but witnessing the weakness of my partner practically did me in, right there. Another soft “hey” from Starsky resulted in the both of us just looking in each other’s eyes and conveying all we meant to say that way, like we’d done countless times during our partnership._

_Then the orderlies transferred my completely powerless and limp partner to another gurney and took him away. _

_I watched them disappear into the elevator. Suddenly all the everyday sounds of a hospital were audible to me again. As were Captain Dobey’s words; that the computer had spit out three primes – Martini, Wedell and Bellamy – and that one of them had to have been the one responsible for Starsky’s impending and likely inevitable death. _

_It was as if my brain was reset by my anger when it suddenly hit me: Bellamy did not have the wits to come up with such a sophisticated compound as was used to poison my partner._

_As time kept slipping away, I would use every second of every minute of each of the two hours Starsky most likely had left to live, to find out who had used Bellamy to carry out the attack on my partner so that I could hopefully save his life._


End file.
